A mixed weekend really. Yankees made an early exit in the playoffs losing to the Detroit Tigers 3 to 1. Could spell the end for A Rod’s career with the Yankees. At 25 mil p.a, I think he deserves the axe. Could also mean the end of Joe Torre’s reign. Touted to have the best offensive line up ever put together, they couldnt quite beat the Tigers bullpen. Ofcourse, there will be endless analyses of the series and heads will roll. For me though, it another year’s wait before I watch the Yankees attempt to regain all that is lost over the last 6 years. Fans who’ve been rooting for a salary cap in MLB will continue to preach, a little louder this time around.

Michael Schumacher’s luck ran out in the Japanese Grand Prix in what was perhaps the most important race of the season. His engine couldnt have blown up at a race more important than the last. I’d hate to see Alonso carry the championship in Michaels last season.

Just got started on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake. Not quite into the family saga types….hopefully, this I will like.

Saturday Night Movie: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Intended to be bloody and gory, it achieves it with ease. Not much in terms of role play and dialogues. Promotions claim it to be the scariest horror movie ever made and they couldnt be more wrong. Gruesome and bloody? Definitely. Infact I cant recall having watched a movie bloodier than the Chainsaw Massacre. Hannibal Lecter, of what i remember, aint even close to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Not a true story by any means (see here), it draws inspiration (if thats what its called) from the real life character of Ed Gein. A true psycho.

Proposed quietly in 1929 was a rather radical concept called ‘Six Degrees of Separation’.
For about 5 decades starting 1950, many people set out to find some truth behind this theory, the most famous attempt of them all being the ‘Small world problem’ which resulted in some surprising and as often happens, debatable results.
On a rather uninteresting day earlier this month, a cousin of mine suggested I get back on Orkut.
The ‘back’ hints at an explanation that is quite capable of derailing a certain thought train and shall therefore be omitted. Orkut has a certain intersting history associated with it. Orkut Buyukkokten, a former google employee and now a PhD student at Stanford was the brain behind the social networking portal aptly titled Orkut. Introduced by google in 2004, its popularity has soared over the 2 or so years. As I had done before I set out to create a profile and look for friends long lost with the hope of getting back in touch with them. In a few minutes of doing so, it dawned on me that the world is a much smaller place than I had imagined it to be. Almost every long lost pal of mine seems to be somehow connected to one of more recent friends and I had no idea!! Ofcourse, things become a little less complicated should I mention that most of them landed up as Engineers like moi and a bunch of them must’ve landed up in the same engineering school. Ofcouse it could just be that my world of Orkut represents an engineering community that I am a part of but nonetheless I couldnt help but wonder about Frigyes Karinthy’s theory of ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ and the possibility of some truth behind this theory.
I would love to delve a little deeper into this theory and its origins. Hopefully, it makes some interesting reading.

Good architecture invariably makes me smile. My recent memory of one such occurence is in the month of september ’05. I wandered along the financial district of Manhattan trying to bring in some amount of motivation and a bit of inspiration to what was a period of monotony as far as my life was concerned. I debated with myself if the idea of my wandering around the financial district looking for a shot of motivation was weird. Very soon I arrived at the conclusion that it was quite natural considering that many a painter,a poet, a writer and a thinker has travelled the corners of the world with the hope of fulfilling a similar need. My train of thoughts quickly changed tracks as I entered the world finanical district in the basement of which is an architectural plan of the freedom tower (the tower that is to fill the void of Ground Zero). I spent a few thoughtful moments studying the model amazed at the whole concept of this work of art.
More recently the New York Times carried an article titled “Afloat in the Flood Zone”. It brought to the fore a radical concept of floating houses and townships with the idea that instead of fighting water in the often flooded regions of earth, one might want to use it. A faint glow rekindled in the recycle area of my brain where I found a strand of memory crying to be restored. So I did. The concept of floating structures has been around for a few decades now and save a few model homes here and there, the idea hasn’t really taken off. The battle for designing a stable mechanism to hold afloat a structure and yet keep its cost low proved to be a losing one. I once read about an airport in Japan that was being designed to rise and dip in accordance with the tide of the waters…in other words, a floating airport. Wonder if that really took off……..
As the article lays out the statistics of Netherlands in terms of rising water levels ever so often attributed to the man-induced climatic changes, the use of this radical concept becomes clear.
We often hear talk of humans inhabiting the Moon (the very optimistic ones replace moon with mars) one day but seldom do you hear talk of a simple house that floats in the sea. I hear a logical brain cell of mine yelling that it might be simpler to build a house on water rather than build a house on the moon or the mars. Sshhhh!!….. All read and said, I shant be too surprised if a bright lad from the Netherlands provides the world with a practical and an economical design of a floating home and as an Ingineur Du Mechanique I’m looking forward to making my own little contributions to the field of radical architecture, ofcourse, with a smile.